OpenOffice 3.1: The new features

Compared to its predecessors, OpenOffice 3.1 offers a whole range of new features. Instant eye catchers are the improved anti-aliasing for graphics, better chart functionality, and the new text highlighting in Writer. However, inconspicuous new features like custom document property fields and the OpenOffice User Feedback Program are just as interesting.

With half a million new lines of code, the OpenOffice developers have invested considerable time and effort in improving the office suite's anti-aliasing capabilities. Pixelated drawings, charts and characters are now a thing of the past: compared with previous versions, the latest edition sports noticeably smoother edges.

It is worth mentioning that the anti-aliasing feature technically only works with vector graphics. Resizing raster graphics, whether imported or created in OpenOffice, will still result in the typical quality loss. Since all the objects, charts and characters drawn in OpenOffice are vectorised by default, however, this only really affects bitmaps. The anti-aliasing feature can be enabled/disabled in the "Options" dialog under "OpenOffice.org/View" by checking or un-checking "Graphics output/Use Anti-Aliasing".